Record-Setting Colorado Fires Destroyed More Than 500 Homes
The New York Times
Unlike fires in mountain wilderness, which often burn over the course of weeks, the destruction on Thursday played out in minutes and hours.
LOUISVILLE, Colo. — It took only a few hours for the flames to cut an unimaginable path of destruction across the drought-starved neighborhoods between Denver and Boulder.
By Friday morning, as smoke from the most damaging wildfire in state history cleared, more than 500 homes, and possibly as many as 1,000, had been destroyed. Hundreds of people who had hastily fled returned to ruins, everything they owned incinerated in the fast-moving blaze. Entire neighborhoods had been reduced to ashes.
“It felt like the apocalypse,” said Ruthie Werner, a resident of Louisville, Colo., who had gone to shop at a Target store on Thursday but arrived to find the parking lot ablaze.